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ITY MILBURN
FELICITY MILBURN MAID
TALKS WITH SPAIN TALKS WITH
Felicity Milburn: One of the aims of
SCAPE 2008 is to ‘unfold the already
existing structures and ways of operating
within the city’. What have you learned
about Christchurch so far that will allow
you to do this?
Maider López: The project is explicitly
designed to use a particular space in
the city, with the aim of highlighting
the space in question. It will focus on
people’s daily experience of the space
and of the city itself. Signs in the City
Mall are the starting point – these public
signs, whether used for advertising or
for traffic, are ever-present in this part
of the city. However, they have become
such a presence in our daily lives that
we often do not see them or hardly take
any notice of them. The project attempts
to make this fact evident.
MAIDER LOPEZ
MAIDER LÓPEZ
SPAIN
FM: Your work at Christchurch
Art Gallery highlights architectural
elements – loudspeakers, motion sensors,
fire alarms – that visitors to an art gallery
are used to ignoring. What are you
hoping to achieve by making the
‘invisible’ visible in this way?
ML: My work for Christchurch is
divided into two parts: the first is in
the public space of City Mall, and the
second is inside the Gallery. In Cashel
Street, people will be positioned in
unusual places so as to hide all the
advertising and traffic signs that can
be seen from specific points of view.
However, inside the Gallery I will
showcase the signs that the Gallery
uses for the operation of their facility.
Usually these signs are kept hidden in
order to highlight the pieces of art
on display, but in this case I will try
to highlight these signs and integrate
them with the normal Gallery signs. As
a result, in City Mall the visible will be
made invisible, while at the Gallery the
invisible will be visible.
FM: Your work often plays with the idea
of the absurd. Does humour allow you
to achieve things you wouldn’t be able
to otherwise?
ML: I am interested in the idea of
creating something odd or absurd from
what is seemingly a totally normal
everyday act. Thus, in the blink of an eye,
daily life becomes extraordinary. That
turns what is real into scenography.
In order to do this, humour plays a
very important role in my projects, as
it allows the public to have a greater
connection with my work.
FM: Many of your previous projects
have required considerable public
participation, such as Playa (2006),
in which sunbathers on a beach
were asked to use only red towels,
or Ataskoa (2005), for which you
choreographed a major case of
gridlock on a mountain road. How
has this participation complicated and
enriched your practice?
ML: It is certainly true that, on many
occasions, my work is carried out with
public participation. It is, in fact, the
people who made the project. In Playa
everyone used red towels in order to
transform a beach scene in August into
a highly implausible scene. Ataskoa was a
public project with a festive atmosphere
in which people were asked to create a
traffic jam halfway up a normally quiet
mountain road. This decontextualised an
almost routine situation in our everyday
lives and made it possible to see this
situation from a different perspective.
At Dunafelfedes in Budapest, people at
Chain Bridge simultaneously opened
their umbrellas – which were all the
same colour as the Danube. From
an aerial perspective the bridge had
‘vanished’, unifying the people with
the water. These projects have been
made with the active participation of
the public to show people’s capacity to
transform urban spaces and to create
new cities with the use of space.
Interview translated from Spanish by
Rosa Marina San José Velarde.
Sponsored by:
SEACEX Design & Arts
Fulton Hogan
The Arts Centre
Maider López AdosAdos Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, 2007
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